Sergeant Whitfield looked at all of it: the bags, the badge hanging outside his pullover, the crowd, the phones, the hockey team, the young woman in the Kansas State sweatshirt still recording with grim concentration, the janitor, the guard with the buzz cut breathing hard, and the man in the gray suit with his arms folded.
"Who put hands on who first?" she asked.
Nobody said anything for a second.
"He did," said the young woman in the Kansas State sweatshirt, pointing at the man in the suit. "He shoved him into the window. Then the guard grabbed him. I've got all of it." She held up the phone. "I'm a seventh-grade science teacher in Manhattan, Kansas. I'm not on anybody's side. I've got all of it."
"I'd appreciate a copy of that, ma'am. Don't go anywhere." Whitfield turned to the man in the suit. "Sir. Your name."
"Curtis Lindqvist. Look, Sergeant, I saw a guy running with an old lady's purse. Okay? What was I supposed to do? I'm sorry if, look, I'm sorry if it's a misunderstanding. But that's what it looked like. Anybody would have..."
"ID, please."
He dug a wallet out of his jacket and handed over a Colorado license. Whitfield read it aloud into her shoulder radio for the record, spelling it out. L-I-N-D-Q-V-I-S-T. Curtis Arne. Date of birth, address in Highlands Ranch.
Curtis Arne.
Desmond kept his face very still. He had flown in thunderstorms with a face that still. He had once landed in Bozeman with a hydraulic failure and a cabin full of people who did not know anything was wrong, because his face had been that still, and his voice. He looked at the pale blue eyes. He thought of a woman in a lavender cardigan saying, my son, Curtis, he had a call. He thought of the four times her hand had gone to the phone in her cardigan pocket while they waited for the supervisor, and dialed, and listened, and lowered it again.
He said nothing. It was not his to say. Not here. Not yet.
"And you're Captain..." Whitfield looked at the badge.
"Desmond Hale. Cordillera Airlines. I'm working a departure out of this concourse." He did not say which one. He felt the omission as he made it, a small deliberate thing, like holding a control input a half second longer than the checklist asked. "It was supposed to push in..." He glanced at his watch. The crystal was cracked. Seven-sixteen. "Thirty-nine minutes."
"Can anybody vouch for the purse?"